Artemis Project

On June 28th, we kicked off the 15th year of the Artemis Project here at Brown University. The Artemis Project is a free, five-week summer day camp for rising 9th-grade girls in the Providence area that teaches computer skills, programming, and computer science concepts through engaging activities, therby encouraging young women to join the field of computer science.

The Artemis Project is coordinated by undergraduate women from Brown University in connection with Brown's Computer Science Department. This year, Artemis also has a coordinator from Boston University. We are pleased to be working with 21 talented rising 9th-grade girls from all around Rhode Island.

During the first week of the camp, we worked with the girls to teach them about a few Adobe design products, such as Photoshop and Illustrator. In the second week, we helped the girls design and build their very own web pages. We also have had a number of guest speakers come and talk to the girls -- including representatives from Adobe and Google, as well as professor Andy van Dam and post-doc Suzanne Sindi of Brown University -- about a wide range of computer science-related topics.

This week we've been working with the girls to learn Java. They will be using Java to code their very own Tic-Tac-Toe games. They will also be using Java to program the new Finch robots that we are introducing this year.

Besides our work in the computer lab, we also have classroom activities covering a wide range of topics that are essential for all computer scientists to know. We taught the girls about binary numbers and Boolean logic, some graph theory (breadth first search and depth first search), and some computational linguistics. We have also gone on two field trips so far: the Wheeler School Ropes Course and the Boston Museum of Science.

At the Artemis Project, the girls get along well and have had their own bonding experiences. The coordinators are developing friendships with the girls and the mentoring experience has proven rewarding for both the undergraduate coordinators and the high-school girls.